The Globe, Laugharne: a building with a hundred lives

One corner of Laugharne has been the same building for two hundred years and hardly ever the same thing twice — coaching inn, ballroom, tax office, the town's butcher, and now a place to eat and drink again.

Stand at the top of the street, where Market Street turns into Duncan Street, and look across from the Town Hall. The Globe has stood on this corner for two hundred years, and the reason it is a listed building is not its grandeur — it is its place: it belongs to the block that faces the seat of the town's government. The Globe was never grand. It was always central.

It began as a coaching inn. By 1830 it was "the well-established Inn," kept by Thomas Edwards, and it was built to take horses off the road — walk round to Duncan Street and the cambered carriage archway and its cobbled yard are still there. For a while it was also the town's ballroom, with Regency fireplaces and, in 1835, the "Second Laugharne Assembly." And for some thirty years the same building the town drank in was where the town paid: the Globe served as Laugharne's excise office through the middle of the century.

Then it changed trade altogether. From about 1920 it became the Gleed family's butcher's shop, and the Gleeds held it for roughly eighty years, closing on Bobby Gleed's retirement in 1991 — Laugharne has had no butcher since. The old listing still carries their name. Behind the archway, a rear range was fitted out as a working abattoir, and the holding pens and walled garden behind it are said, within living memory, to have held livestock before slaughter.

After the butcher came the phrase the building earned for itself — a hundred lives. In the years since it is said to have been, at various times, a wartime billet in its old ballroom, an auction room, a video-hire shop, a bank, and a private home, before standing empty for over a decade. Its atmospheric barrel-vaulted cellars survive beneath. In October 2024 it opened again as the Globe Bar, Restaurant and Bakery.

Two hundred years, and the pattern holds: whatever the town needed on this corner, the Globe was it. It never had a single vocation — it had a location.